Of Mice and Multimedia

I suppose if I have a mission, it’s about trying to explain design. The first part of my life was being a designer. The next chunk was helping other people design in teams as IDEO got bigger. Now that we have younger people looking after IDEO, I feel free to try to tell stories about design. The stories I’d like to tell are the ones that make it a little bit easier for people to understand how design operates.

And why it’s relevant. It’s interesting how hard it is to design an interface that is so intuitive. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know. We actually have a lot to learn from games. The evolution is so much more dramatic there and the people who don’t succeed in making a game instantly attractive and easy to use and enjoyable, the game doesn’t exist—it gets taken off the shelves within a week. Computer games are actually a very good lesson. I was really interested in the interview with [“Sims” creator] Will Wright because he’s very articulate about the way that games work. He talks about these loops of engagement where the first thing is that your design allows people to understand the control device within a few seconds and then gives them something to do that they can understand within about a half a minute. And if you go gradually through these loops of interactivity, you can get to the point where you’re doing something that takes weeks to do in a very hobbyist game like the Sims.

Another product that has been successful along these terms has been the iPod. Why has no one been able to touch the iPod in terms of competition?

The thing that became really clear with the interview with [software designer] Paul Mercer is that it’s a systemic solution. Apple bought a company that had the iTunes music technology first and then did the Apple magic of making it beautiful to look at and easy to use. They did that several years before the iPod was designed. Only when the ability to manipulate your music on your computer was well established did they introduce the iTunes music store, which was a way of buying it online and an answer to Napster that people could feel it was reasonable to pay a dollar for a song. Only when those two things were in place did they actually make a physical product. In all cases those designs are excellent. You have to give design a lot of credit for the advantage that Apple has. But I believe you have to have both excellent design that people like or fall in love with, and you also have to have the systemic approach that looks at the entire experience.

What’s next in terms of interaction design?